vArchitect Newsletter 023

New Releases

After all the new releases in April mentioned in our previous newsletter, VMware kept the best for last and dropped a bunch more in the same month. We have a lot of new releases to cover, so let’s go through them. There’s so much that’s new and different in each one, we can’t mention even the largest points here, but definitely check out the release notes.

vCenter Server 6.7a

The first patch release for vSphere 6.7 is out and fixes issues in vCenter regarding many upgrade bugs. This is why, if you must jump to the latest release, you at least wait for a few weeks for this “a” patch to come out. Anyway, release notes are here.

Still no Veeam 9.5 compatibility yet with 6.7. Patch pending for June.

Update from VeeamON 2018

VeeamON 2018 was in Chicago this year and a couple folks from Sovereign were able to attend. Although there weren’t any explosive releases, there were still some good announcements of updates to existing products and word on futures. Here are the main things.

Backup for Office 365 updated to 2.0. Will contain the requested backup for OneDrive and SharePoint enhancements.

VBR 9.5 U3a pending in June bringing vSphere 6.7 and vSphere 6.5 U2 support. DON’T UPDATE VSPHERE YET. Some major changes VMware made under the covers broke lots of functionality hence the delay including changes to NBDSSL.

Most functionality slated for v10 has been incorporated into 9.5 U3 or the upcoming U4 at the end of 2018. Some of those features will be:

Spilling backup data to cloud. Similar to a recall feature, data can be silently moved to public cloud providers and all Veeam features continue to work as-is.

Selective data deletion. For GDPR reasons, customers can request themselves to be deleted. Coming ability to “stage” a restore and delete selective content before going back into production.

Quarantine. Triggers full anti-virus scan on the mount server before a restore. Provided with integration from various different providers ensuring a clean restore for malware treatment.

Veeam log scanning. Feature being built into Veeam ONE similar to Runecast that scans logs and detects known issues, offers remediation.

Direct restore to EC2. Similar to how restore to Azure works today, will be provided for EC2 instances.